My Mother's Daughter
an excerpt

I am Siddonie, daughter of Larique Avernya.
“Ah,” you say, eyebrows rising. You look away, quickly, and change the subject. Probably, you ask about my father. I will tell you whatever you like about him, about the estate at Nenne on the sea, about last year’s harvest and the state of trade with the East. My father in an important man, powerful, rich. He is easy, and safe, to talk about.
His wife is not.
If you did ask, and I answered—if we were good friends, sitting alone in the garden with no one to hear and gossip but the servants (and they will gossip anyway, whether they hear something or not)—I might say something like, “Well, I do not know her very well. She moved to her house in town when I was seven.”
“But surely,” you would press. “You know something. Even as a small child, life with Larique Avernya cannot have been... ordinary.”
Perhaps it was not; it was ordinary to me. I remember painting with her, mashing expensive colours across a carefully-prepared canvas with childish abandon, my mother smiling and mashing with me while my nursemaid shook her head in horror. I remember wandering the gardens at the country house, and the fields beyond them, while she told me the names of the flowers, some of them in three languages—our own tongue, and the tongue of Corunat, where she lived with her first husband, the astrologer-scribe, until the war destroyed that country and she fled, and the language of her birth, in the distant kingdoms of the west. I have been schooled in Corunat since, which is not so different from the language of Tintanie, but I have never learnt more of that western tongue, though I have heard its alien music in her voice all my life.
“It is said that they loved each other very much—there are songs still sung about that love story,” you will say.
It is true. I learnt those songs from my nursemaid, though my mother blushed and laughed whenever she heard them, waving the singer to silence. I do remember love, I think—quiet moments when my parents would walk together in the garden, my father tumbling me on his knee while my mother watched smiling. Even now, when they meet—though my mother is not often seen at the public events my father frequents—they smile sweetly at each other, and kiss on the cheek, and once I watched them dance as if a choked fire drove their steps.
When I was younger, this hurt me; I could not understand why this woman who seemed to love my father had abandoned us. I thought, for a long time, that it was because of me. Surely there was some lack or flaw in me that drove her off, made life in our house unbearable. I cried many nights, thinking this, and though my nursemaid and my father both told me it was not so, I did not believe them. My mother, whom I might have believed, I never saw.
“She has gone to live in the city,” my father told me when I asked. “She has her own house there.”
“But why?”
“It’s better this way,” he said. Then, he would change the subject. “How are your dreams, lately?”
He confused me. “Not special. I dreamt of riding my pony over a jump, last night, and when we landed you gave me a blue ribbon.”
He smiled. “Good dreams.”